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Started the Civil War the Cotton Gin Was a Simple Mechanism by Today's Standards, but Its Influence Divided and Then United a Nation

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Started the Civil War the Cotton Gin Was a Simple Mechanism by Today's Standards, but Its Influence Divided and Then United a Nation ASME is reviewing this article to reflect current historical scholarship on the subject. Please check back soon for an update. Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/131/09/54/6631445/me-2009-sep5.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 A Turn o/the Crank Started the Civil War The cotton gin was a simple mechanism by today's standards, but its influence divided and then united a nation. By Robert O. Woods s engineers, we are in the business term has become almost a single word ,in every English of taking something that exists vocabulary. ("Gin" is a corruption of "engine," itself a only in the mind, making. it tan­ term for any machine.) It is significant that one rarely gible, and put~ing it out into the sees an illustration of this legendary machine, although real world. This usually involves a we hear of it often enough. Knowing as much as we depth of understanding and a high do about its reputation and being conditioned to expect degree of ingenuity. a revelation, what a present-day engineer sees when he But there have been cases in actually looks into the hardware is an anticlimax. which the mere fact of an engi­ Historical significance is obviously not proportional to neer's having been on the scene at the right time pro­ mechanical complexity. Only after comparing the econ­ duced an effect totally out of proportion to what may omy of the American South before and after the intro­ have been a negligible amount of real engineering. The duction of the gin can we appreciate its real impact. cotton gin might be history's best example of that. The gin was more important sociologically than tech­ Eli Whitney conceived it almost on the spur of the nically. Before the gin, slavery had been on its way out. moment. He went on to other things and became famous Farmers had learned that it cost more to maintain a slave as an engineer, but the gin, which itself was a very simple than he could produce-if a human was to be judged on mechanism, went farthest to ensure his place in history. a purely monetary basis. References to the cotton gin are so numerous that the Before introduction of the gin, cotton had been a mild­ ly interesting but barely productive crop. That changed Robert O. Woods. a Fellow of ASME. is a frequent contributor dramatically with the advent of the gin. Prior to the gin's to Mechanical Engineering. introduction cotton fiber could only be separated from 54 mechanical engineering I September 2009 ASME is reviewing this article to reflect current historical scholarship on the subject. Please check back soon for an update. the sticky, embedded seeds by a manual operation. earliest examples of cotton fabric were found in a river val­ The procedure was so slow that cotton was just bare­ ley is significant. It is generally thought that the configura­ ly commercially attractive. So little could be produced tion of the cotton boll allowed plants, which were native to that the greatest application was in such specialized little river banks, to proliferate by floating seeds downstream. things as candle wicks. An individual would work ten That twenty-first century science fair student would hours to separate a pound of fib er from seeds. have had the advantage of growing up in a culture in Production increased by a staggering amount with the which mechanical solutions to problems are no novelty; introduction of the cotton gin. A team of two or three they are expected. That wasn't the case in the 1790s. But Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/131/09/54/6631445/me-2009-sep5.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 could then process fifty pounds of cotton in a single as with the steam engine, when all the pieces were at day. Cotton growing suddenly became lucrative, and an hand, it was inevitable that someone would put them unexpected tidal wave of cotton fields sprang up. It soon together. Eli Whitney did that. became by far the major export of the South. Growth and harvesting ofcotton was very labor intensive, and thus the demand for manpower led to a sharp increase in what had previously been a small traffic in slaves. The climate and the agricultural experience in. the South were more suitable for cotton growth than in the North. These factors caused the importation of slaves to be heavily directed toward the South. Although there was initially no law against slavery in the North, the North played a relatively small part in the slave trade. This dichotomy in culture inevitably led to the catastrophe that we know as the Civil War. And it was all precipitated by a very simple machine. The mechanism is primitive by our standards. Any high school student competing in a science fair could come up with the same thing. This is not to denigrate Whitney's ingenuity. He lived in. a time when no one had yet thought of applying machinery to a, six-thousand-year-old ~-:;::I""""m;HL Cotton fabl'ic had been known as early .c. ~n the Inclus Valley. The fact that the ASME is reviewing this article to reflect current historical scholarship on the subject. Please check back soon for an update. It was a matter of pure chance that Whitney found powered by steam engines and the belts were replaced himself involved with cotton growing. After getting with gears. a degree from Yale he had gone South for a tutoring The operation is so straightforward that little explana­ job in South Carolina. When the job did not material­ tion is required. In Whitney's patent application cotton ize, he was offered a position by Catherine Littlefield boIls, seeds and all, were loaded into a hopper which Greene of Savannah and resolved to spend his time guided them to the face of the comb. After being pulled studying law. If he had persisted in that, world history through it by the toothed cylinder, the separated cotton might have been different. fibers emerged at the left and the seeds were collected in Whitney's new landlady owned a plantation which a hopper at the right. grew a little cotton. She had inherited the farm, being A computerized animation of Whitney's patent is cur­ the widow ofNathanael Greene, the Revolutionary War rently available on line in the section devoted to the cot­ general. While he was with Catherine Greene, Whitney ton gin at www.eliwhitney.org. The seeds, by the way, also Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/131/09/54/6631445/me-2009-sep5.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 displayed a previously untapped genius for mechanical have commercial value although not on the scale of the things. She brought this to the attention of a couple of cotton fib er itself. In addition to the familiar cottonseed oil, fellow plantation owners while they were discussing the which is used in cooking and candy making, seeds are used fact that there was no economical method of separating in such widely assorted applications as cattle feed, paper, seeds from cotton fib er. Whitney recognized that it could and as a source of cellulose for making nitrocellulose. be done mechanically and soon produced a design con­ Whitney and his gin are monuments to Man's imagina­ cept. Mrs. Greene is frequently overlooked when the his­ tion, which can intrude on reality and, armed sometimes tory of the gin is described; nonetheless it appears that it with only small pieces of the physical world, profoundly was her suggestion to Whitney that led to its invention. influence history. His gin involved only a few hundred He spent some months reducing his concept to prac­ kilograms of matter but it shaped the future of a nation tice and building a prototype whose design was almost and affected for all time the relations among the people immediately stolen and counterfeited a vast number of who were to be born into it. It is rare that a single con­ times. Whitney was later involved in years of patent liti­ trivance has such a profound social effect. gation which in the end brought him only a tiny fraction Only Galileo, with a few grams of optical glass in a tele­ of the wealth he was entitled to. His patent was issued in scope, had a greater impact on history. He removed the 1794 and turned out to be oflittle value. Earth from the center of the universe. Whitney brought Following Whitney's innovation a major industry devel­ about a social revolution. _ oped to manufacture gins and was well under way by the 1840s. To this day its descendants are producing now­ modernized gins. The Continental Eagle Corp., which can For Further Reading trace its ancestry back to 1832, now claims to have manu­ factured more gins than any other producer in the world. An Eli Whitney Museum exists in Hamden, Conn., and The loss to piracy was not a total disaster for Whitney, has a Web site at www.eliwhitney.org. One of its bio­ because a decade later it was his reputation as an innovator graphical sketches of Whitney is taken from "American that got him a government contract to produce ten thou­ Science and Invention: A pictorial History," Simon and sand muskets-a previously unheard-of number. Schuster, 1954, pp. 78-83. Because of this contract, every engineer has heard that Whitney invented mass production, although the situa­ An animated overlay on Whitney's patent [Mar.14, 1794) tion was not quite as simple as we are led to believe.
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